


Though This Be Madness

by Bakcheia



Category: The Scorpio Races - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: F/M, Post-Canon, Present Tense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 19:09:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5467763
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bakcheia/pseuds/Bakcheia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which getting appropriate medical care for man-eating sea monsters is exactly as difficult as it sounds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Though This Be Madness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pressdbtwnpages](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pressdbtwnpages/gifts).



> Ah! Thank you so much for requesting this book, I had a blast writing for it.
> 
> Warnings: Contains animal harm, but nothing that goes beyond canon levels.

**Puck**

 

The night after the Scorpio races the beach is empty and serene. The dry sand above the tide mark is messy with footprints and litter; half a forgotten November cake squashed into gritty oblivion, the grey glitter of sweet papers, two brass bells threaded onto a twist of scarlet cord. It looks much like any beach in the tourist season, already the tide has washed up the sand and sucked the red out of it, filling in the plate-sized hoof prints. The more fortunate amongst the dead have been carried away on stretchers to be mourned and then buried, or burnt, as their families see fit. The unluckier ones, caught in teeth or saddles, have been taken into the sea, leaving their families to walk the tideline in mingled dread and hope.

The sea has taken many things, after all, but sometimes it gives them back.

 

Three days after the races, the body of Mutt Malvern washes up on the shore. It is not his father who finds him, though he has been walking the sands at every low and high tide, like a child on the look out for shells, or bright sea glass polished smooth. It takes another day for the body to be recognised, for he is not the only one whom the _capaill uisce_ took into the sea and it has kept his clothes and a good deal of his flesh besides. The tattered little that is left could have been anyone and has to be carried into town and identified by the teeth.

 

This is why I am attending a funeral, a bare week after the races with the taste of victory lingering inappropriately in my mouth and making me want to smile whenever I think of it. Benjamin Malvern must like his funerals as traditional as his tea because he is burning, rather than burying his son, even though he has the money for a burial plot anywhere he wants.

 The body was not intact enough to bear washing so everything has been bound up in a sheet, the shape as knobby and mysterious as a Christmas present and when the fire catches it the flames flicker blue with burning salt.

The smoke from the pyre stings my eyes and makes them water, it looks like I am crying for Mutt, which I resent. Mutt tortured horses, pissed in Sean's shoes, I think he tried to kill me in the races and I am glad to see his body burned. I am only here for Sean, who is here, like all the grooms, half from a sense of duty and half because Malvern has demanded it.

I think he was worried no one would turn up, if he wasn't paying them.

 Everyone knows that Mutt Malvern, alive, was a continual and visible disappointment to his father, who only had to go out into his front yard to see his son's backside thumping into the saddle with every stride of the horse, whilst his heavy hands dug the bit into sensitive, feeling flesh. Mutt Malvern, with his petty, pointless cruelties, his stupidity and ceaseless nagging spites is no loss to anybody, least of all his father.

But the body that was found on the beach did not look like Mutt Malvern. The body on the beach could have belonged to anyone, a blank canvas of possibility.

For what is perhaps the first time, Malvern seems to love the thing he called a son.

“Matthew” he says, simply and flatly. “My boy.”

 He knows Sean did everything he could to keep Mutt alive. He knows also that Sean is glad he failed.

 

I think it will be hard for Sean, working at the stables, at least until Malvern forgets the potential of his son and remembers the leaden reality of him.

The cold November wind tugs at my hair and stings my cheeks, so I take Sean's red fingers into my gloved ones and we stand with joined hands and solemn faces at the funeral of a man we are both happy to see burned.

 

  ***     *     ***

 

Three months after the Scorpio Races, the piebald climbs out of the sea.

I ignore the rumours at first. At first, indeed, they are easy to ignore; the piebald, saddled and bridled with bells ringing at her heels, gallops the length of the sands as if driven by the ghost of Mutt himself, still trying to prove himself at the races. The people who see her are drunk and boasting; _I saw the piebald, I saw Mutt Malvern riding the piebald and the moonlight shining all through him, I met the piebald on the road and came so close I could have touched her._

But then a farmer loses a valuable collie dog, and lays both the body and the debt at Gorry's door, saying the _capall uisce_ who did it was the same black and white as the dog and wearing Mutt's colours. Another, hearing bells chiming outside, peers through her window and sees a great horse, near 18 hands, reduced to an incomplete jigsaw of white in the darkness. Sheep disappear and are found days later, chewed open from neck to navel and hollowed all through, shreds and flickers of gold cloth found in the stead of heart and lungs and liver.

 

I would worry more about it if I were not boiling over with worries of my own. Because they are my own now, even though I have known Sean less than a quarter year, the same way Gabe's fears and griefs are no longer mine, though he has only been gone for a few weeks and I have known him all my life.

 Corr's leg is not healing as well as he had hoped and his hopes had never been high. No more than for a lame horse, a horse that could not run, or be ridden - just a horse who could stand without pain and put up his head to smell the sea and be happy. But Corr will not even put the leg to the ground and the increased weight is starting to tell on the other three, the hooves showing early signs of splitting and the joints warm to the touch.

Holly sends him a book on equine physiotherapy, a shiny, official looking hardcover with an index of unfamiliar words. He means well, and me and Sean read it together in the evenings and learn about steroids and hydrotherapy, internal fixation and stem cells.

We might as well be learning how to cure Corr with fairy dust and a magic wand. Surgery and injections are all very well for land horses, with rich American owners but the vets on Thisby do not have steroids and stem cells to give and even if they did, not a one of them would put themselves in a stall with an angry, hurting _cappall_ .

 I don't blame them, even though Corr is better than the others and I like him as much as I could like any of the _capaill_ , that is, as much as I could like anything that would eat my heart right out of my body if I made the wrong move.

 Except that I think that about Sean sometimes; that he could take my heart right out my chest, if he wanted to.

 Three months and three weeks after the Scorpio races, he does.

 

  ***     *     ***

 

“I want to swim Corr”

Sean's announcement silences the dinner time conversation as effectively as a gunshot. Suddenly I know exactly how my brothers felt when I said I was going to ride in the races, so exactly that it feels like some kind of punishment.

 “No. Absolutely not.” The words are out of my mouth before I can even think about whether I have any right to say them. Perhaps he will laugh at my presumption. Perhaps if he does I'll stab him in the hand with my fork.

Finn freezes on the other side of the table, probably torn between leaving us to argue in peace and staying in the hope that his presence will embarrass us into not arguing at all.

Between the money from the races and Finn's apprenticeship at the bakery we are eating even better than when my parents were alive and we face each other down over plates of steaming beef stew, with plump, honey-glazed buns for afterwards.

I am in love with the life we have made for ourselves, almost as much as I love the people we have made it with.

I like coming down to a kitchen that has become impregnated with the smells of tea and butter and boiling sugar, knowing that there is plenty to eat and all of it good. People who say that money doesn't buy happiness don't see the safety in it; money can't buy you love but it can buy the people you love food and a house and medical care, it can buy sacks of grain and firewood. It is comfortable, with a comfort I had become so used to not having that the strain of its absence had become almost unnoticeable, until it had been lifted.

It sounds absurd, but on an island in a sea of monsters, an island which has killed or cast out the parents of everyone in this room, I had felt safe. And now Sean wants to take that away and is as calm about it as if it meant nothing at all.

The sense of threat feels immediate, palpable, as if he is threatening to burn the house down, rather than sitting composedly at the table, picking apart a bun as he explains the benefits of hydrotherapy in rehabilitating injured horses. George Holly and his heavy, shiny, official looking books can go to hell and rot there.

“Corr will kill you if you go into the sea with him.”

God bless Finn for saying what Sean won't, sitting there explaining the mechanics of the process as if the problem was with us, as if we didn't understand.

Sean looks across the table at him, considering. His eyes are the grey-green of old silver, or like the sea under the blanched November sun. _'One foot on the land and one foot in the sea'_ people say, but not both. Never both, not if I can help it.

I put my knife and fork together with a click on the edge of my plate and spread my hands appealingly, making myself look reasonable.

“You know him better than anyone. If he loves you so much, then promise me he'll let you come back. If you promise that, I'll let you go, I'll even help.”

It's a low trick, a dirty trick, to act like he needs my permission to do what he wants with his own life and his own horse but I have seen the bodies that wash up after the Scorpio races and in that moment everyone of them bears his face.

He does not promise.

He can't.

 

***     *     ***

 

I sleep badly that night and wake early and there is a hot spike of anxiety in me that won't let me stay in bed and luxuriate. I eat fresh bread with butter thick on it for breakfast but I don't enjoy a bite of it and it is in a black mood that I pull on my boots and leave the house to check on Dove.

The cold glare of early morning sunlight leaves me squinting and so it is the bells that warn me first, brass bells, Scorpio bells, jangling and chiming like it is Festival day again.

 

The piebald has come to my house.

 

Instinctively my eyes flick to Dove's lean to, there is no sign of her but there is no blood either and none of the boards are broken and she is wise enough to stay still and quiet in the presence of a _capall_. A stupider horse would have screamed and kicked and been killed and I would have known to stay inside the house. I am not sorry that she is as smart as she is.

 It is unusual for a water horse to come so far in land this time of year, and so often but as soon as I see the piebald I know why she has done so. Mutt did not love her as Sean loves Corr, he had no trust in her and beyond that, he liked to see a living thing in pain. The iron breastplate that she wore in the races, heavy and sharp with nails, has been fastened so tightly that she has not been able to rid herself of it. The weight of it has been sinking her, the straps of it rubbing her and the iron nails have twisted themselves so deeply inside of her that some of them have almost disappeared.

So now she is at my door, driven out of the sea by the ceaseless dragging ache of it, drawn by the thought of warm, slow prey and with perhaps the dim notion that what human hands had put on, they could remove again.

 

She takes two coy, frisking steps towards me and her hooves ring like charms on the packed gravel of the drive. The skin over her fetlocks is broken where the bells have struck them and with every prancing movement the nails of the breastplate twist a little deeper into the staring hide. I think of the dead sheep that they have found on the road. I think of Finn, whistling and pulling his boots on and hearing the sound of crows, going outside to check...

I know three things: that she tried to kill Dove during the races, that she will kill me now, if she can and that if I leave her like this I will never be proud of myself again.

Sean could help her. He talks to the _capaill uisce_ with one hand gripping their wiry forelocks, pulling their heads down to stop them from biting and with the other he turns an ear towards him. He tells them what they need to hear and they listen. He told me, one night, about the boy on the sands who begged a red horse ' _please, do not eat my father'_ and how, at the end of that raw November day, the body was brought home whole.

But I am Puck Connolly and though the piebald is small mouthed and narrow faced, with a muzzle of pink velvet, somehow I know that if I put my head to hers what I pull back will never look human again.

 

No whispers then, no wavering circle of salt or knots in her mane, twined in tight groups of three and nine. This mare will not listen to our island magic and even a hundredweight of iron was not enough to stop her taking Mutt into the sea.

Everyone knows the _capaill_ like a moving target, something to chase. I am as slow as thick treacle in stepping towards her, slower still as I raise my hand to the straps that press the nails so cruelly into her. Up close I can tell that she smells even worse than she did on the day of the choosing, a rotten, animal stink, sweet and oppressive. It is strangely familiar and before I can stop myself I remember where I know it from; she smells just like Mutt did, before they lit the fire.

The piebald mare is fast, maybe even faster than Corr, it would be beyond useless for me to run from her and yet as I stand there in her drowning stench I know I will try anyway if she turns on me.

The first strap undoes readily enough, the buckle is made of good steel and hasn't rusted in the salt water, the second is just as easy, but the girth sticks. My muscles are jellied, my fingers slip on the leather and what would have taken a minute to do on Dove takes five on this reeking, twitching beast.

 

Then I am faced with a new problem, the iron and saddle together weigh near what I do and I haven’t the strength to lift it up and away from her back. She solves the problem for me by jolting away while I am still holding the straps; the nails leave red welts in her hide as they scrape along it but it cannot be called my fault and it is off her now, at least. I mean to lower it gently, so as not to anger her with the clatter of iron but she tosses up her head, her nostrils flaring to give a high, strange pulse of sound and trots around me in a circle, three times, as if trying magic of her own. I must drop it at once or it will make me turn too slow and I will have my back to her.

I want her away from me, away from my house, away from my family. Finn will be getting up soon.

Perhaps if I take up a rock and throw it at her, it will make her leave. Perhaps, as I bend down to get the rock, her teeth will meet in the back of my neck and I will be left for the crows to pick at.

Her sidling, mincing walk takes her up to the fence that lines the road, it is post and rail, easily climbed.

 

_You are mad, Puck Connolly, and your parents would be ashamed._

 

It would be better not to be afraid. The more afraid I am, the more I look like something to chase. She has put her head down to tear at the scarlet ribbons around her legs but I do not think she has forgotten me, not even for a moment.

I move round behind her, keeping well clear of the hooves - so sharp and heavy they could knock the life out of me with a well placed kick - and put my foot on the lowest rail of the fence.

It would be better not to be afraid but my heart is beating so hard I can almost taste my own pulse and it makes me clumsy, this fear I cannot afford to be feeling, just when I need most to trust in the skill of my body.

I drop down to the other side of the fence and keeping it between me and her, move to stand alongside the piebald. All the while she is chewing at the ribbons that bind the bells to her legs, like some mild old nag chewing at a fly bite. I might be a fly myself for all the notice she takes of me, climbing the fence a second time with all the blood of my body swooshing in my ears.

I pause at the top for a moment, mostly in sheer disbelief at my own stupidity, then I swing myself over the top rail of the fence and into the bloody curve of the piebald's back.

She raises her head unnaturally high, neck bending back between her shoulder blades as if someone has tightened the strap of an invisible bearing rein. Her back hollows out underneath me, but there is no explosion of movement, no high, wailing scream or showing of blunt teeth. I twist my fingers as tightly as possible in the chequered mane; land horses are numb all along the mane root and I hope the same is true for the _capaill_ .

I had been expecting her to bolt, to take us somewhere, _anywhere_ , that isn't where my little brother lives but she stands, four-square, though her ribs heave beneath my legs as though she has been racing.

The leather bridle has rotted off, or been bitten through, so I put my leg back and with my heel, tap her in a quarter circle, so that she is facing away from the house, away from the town and towards the sea. Her whole body trembles under me and I can feel the muscles moving under her strange, slick skin. Her long mane flutters over my knees and covers them like a shroud.

I fix my eyes between her inward curving ears and take a deep, shuddering breath. The smell of death is stifling.

I clap my heels to her side and tell her to go.

 

***     *     ***

 

Riding a galloping horse, bareback, is never an effortless flight, no matter how smooth and sure the stride of the animal. The hooves strike the ground in four separate, rapid beats and each beat lurches you a little to one side, or the other. The powerful hindquarters fling you forwards and up, you grip with your calves and your thighs, your stomach and back are tense with the effort of balancing and the breath comes thumping from your lungs in greedy, excited bursts.

But Skata is not an ordinary horse, I cannot believe she is even an ordinary _capall_ , her gait so smooth and fluid that it is no more effort to sit her than it is to take a breath and rise with the swell of the sea.

No wonder Mutt could ride her, anyone could.

We come to a low stone wall, only four feet high but nearly a metre thick and jagged at the top with broken rock. I do not doubt that we can jump it, that we could jump anything, and Skata, the magpie, bunches herself beneath me then flies over it like the bird she is named for. A gust of wind from the sea hits us as we land, bringing with it the smell of seaweed and brine and she becomes, impossibly, faster, so fast I can barely snatch a breath of the air that comes rushing past me.

 

My ears ring, as if someone has hung Scorpio bells inside my head and I am almost blinded by the tears that the stinging wind has wrung from me, so that I feel, rather than see, when we hit the beach. The new ground translates through the piebald's sweating flesh as her hooves muffle themselves in the soft sand, a heavy thumping I feel all through my thighs.

We reach the firm sand, past the tideline, and now her ears are twisting to lie flat against her skull, her mouth cracking open, grinning against the strain of a non-existent bit but even then it takes a spray of seawater against my cheek to awaken me to the danger I am in.

I hurl myself sideways from her back, praying that it will be sand beneath me and not rocks, but the Piebald is fast, faster even than falling and the long neck snakes round and the grinning mouth clamps shut on the loose denim of my jeans.

For an endless, awful moment I dangle and drag, then the cloth gives way and I fall with a splash into the shallows, arms and legs already working to drag myself out of the water and away from her reach.

Her eyes, blue as ice water, roll back to look at me and even with the blood beading on my skin where her teeth have grazed it I can still feel the pull of her.

But her ears are pricked towards the sea, the lines of her body sleeking out and the nostrils closed to slits in the stretching lines of her face.

Already she bears little resemblance to the starving, ribby animal I rode down to the shore. The continents of her hide are shining again where the surf washes them and with the blood slicked away into the water she is again the monster I saw that first day of training, vital and horrible.

I will live because I am nothing to her, not even worth the weight of my own meat. A moment later and she has disappeared entirely in a swirl of white foam, leaving me with nothing but a few strands of horsehair wrapped round my fingers and the marks of her teeth in my calf for thanks.

 

I am angry at myself for taking such a risk for her, as if this sea-born monstrosity was ever worth anything more than a handful of holly berries, but when I remember the iron dragging at her flesh I can't summon the regret to pair with it.

And I don't even love her.

My body aches and I am as tired as if I'd swum here from the mainland but it is miles to the Malvern Yard and if I don't mean to lose my hard won job, I must get up and start walking. Besides, I have to talk to Sean.

 

***     *     ***

 

I walk as fast as I can bring myself to, but I am late anyway and arrive to find the first part of my morning work done. None of the other hands are glowering at me, so either Sean has done it for me or am I more popular than I have any reason to be. I decide on a policy of zealous industry, just in case, and don't get a chance to look for Sean until it is late afternoon and the pale winter sun is hanging low in the sky.

I find him outside of Corr's stall. He has other duties and could have been almost anywhere but Corr's stall was the first place I looked and I am not surprised to be right. He has just finished bandaging Corr's legs and there must be something underneath the bandages, because I can see spreading damp patches where water is soaking through.

“I think it's a good idea to swim Corr.” I offer.

I actually think it's a horrible idea, just one that might work, but I feel I owe Sean something after yesterday.

He nods, shortly, and the argument is over. Neither of us apologises, not him for being ready to ruin my life, nor me for wanting to stop him. We just stand in the purpling light and look at the wreck of what used to be the fastest horse on the island, maybe even the whole world.

“It'll be alright,” I say, eventually, and though we both know I'm lying the breath shudders out of him so I lie again and tell him I'm not angry and then I kiss him, which I mean and then I promise to help, and I mean that too.

 

 That night I stay at the Yard with Sean, in his tiny, bare little flat. Getting out of my wet, salt sticky clothes is an unfathomable relief and I take a moment to stand in tingling nudity before the modest heat of the radiator. There is no way all of my clothes are fitting on it; I will have to choose what I mind being damp the least.

I am not surprised that Sean is looking at me when I turn around but I don't think I'll ever get used to how he looks.

I am familiar with my body, it is ordinary to me and it is hard to imagine it inspiring much of anything at all, let alone the look that Sean wears, and in _Sean Kendrick_ of all people; he has seen the _capaill uisce_ hunting under the sea and the caves of the mare god, and yet somehow he always looks at my small, freckled self as if I am a wonder.

It makes me uncomfortable to be looked at like that, a look that should be for sunsets, or rainbows, or the magic that stirs beneath the surface of the ocean. It also makes me feel very proud and very, very much in love.

I go up to him and put my arms around him and feel how his ribs crook under my fingers. He smells of the sea, of sweat and horses and overwhelmingly, of Corr, the combination is objectively disgusting but I cannot make myself care. Maybe one day, if the sea heals Corr and we are made rich by his children we will have a shining porcelain tub and enough hot water to fill it whenever we want. Then we will go to bed every night smelling of soap and flowers, when we kiss we will taste mint instead of salt and it will not be any better than it is tonight, right now, with sand between my toes and the blood smell of the _capaill_ rising from our bodies.

 

Afterwards he holds me, or I hold him, or both.

He says he knows he will not die, because he is not afraid, but I am worried that is just because he values Corr's life more than his own.

So I kiss him, once on his lips, full and red as holly berries and once on each eyelid - three times, a magic number, a number to calm a water horse with. After, he pushes his face into the scratchy comfort of my sea grass hair and sleeps.

 

I lie awake and wonder how it will happen.

 

Maybe he dies instantly, and his blood hangs in the water like red smoke; maybe he dies slow, and Corr drags him down, down, drags him so deep that the sea thrums in his ears like a second pulse as his lungs clench against the shock of salt water.

His body is never recovered. His body washes up on the shore of the Scorpio sea and I have to look at everything that Corr did to him, or it is smashed to pieces on the rocks and there is not enough left to know anything.

 

I don't like myself in this role, the role of the fretting woman, who tosses and turns in the night over the brave things her lover must do on the morrow and beside, if I toss and turn too much, Sean will probably wake up.

So I get out of the bunk, my bare flesh flinching from the chilly air and fumble myself into whatever clothes my reaching hands fall upon first. I am wearing one of Sean's socks and find myself hankering after the other – mine are still damp from this morning, scratchy with sand and pulling shoes over wet, sandy socks is one of those special unpleasantnesses that never diminishes with repetition.

I pad to the door, noiseless and chafing in clammy trainers and allow myself a good, long stare at Sean's face, at the sharp, uncompromising lines that even sleep cannot soften and I do not think of it discoloured and bloated with long soaking, or wretched with pain and shock. I just look at it, now, exactly as it is and I imagine seeing it there tomorrow and the night after that and all the nights after that, clinking together like pearls on a thread.

And then I leave, closing the door softly behind me and I don't even realise I'm crying until I'm outside and the wind strokes against the wetness on my face.

 

 ***     *     ***  

 

Three months, three weeks and a day after the Scorpio races, I get up early, leaving Sean sleeping and go down to the stables.

There are other _capaill_ than Corr there, two new ones that Sean has helped catch; a mare with a slippery black coat like a wet stone and a stallion the soft grey of sea foam. They are both beautiful, like all the _capaill_ _uisce_ and the mare especially is shaping up to be a potential winner, despite her irritable disposition, but they are nothing to what Corr was and nothing at all to Sean.

The stables are poorly lit at night, too dark to see the red runes above the threshold, or the hand print in old, old blood that splays by the handle of the stall next to Corr's, but I know the Malvern Yard too well by now to forget that they are there.

Corr is standing stiffly in the middle of his stall, his ears are flitched back and his eyes half closed in the lazy, almost sleepy look that means pain in a horse. It makes him look deceptively mild.

When he sees me he makes a sound at the back of his throat, a low, clucking sound and the mare, the black one, rubs her side restlessly against the stone wall of her stable and clucks back.

I draw back the double iron bolts with a thumping heart. It is the first time I have been alone with him and I have seen him kill a man and held that man's hand as he died. Some of his muscle has wasted off him and he is tucked up with pain but he is still massive, a brooding, blood red shape in the dark that I must shut myself in with and be close to.

I move towards him until my nearness makes his skin twitch and then I take two step closer still.

I think about the boy on the beach, and the red horse, and a body that the sea didn't take.

Curling one hand into the wiry forelock, I pull down his head so he cannot bite and with the other I turn his ear towards me.

The inside of the stable smells of salt and blood; Corr's head remains lowered and placid but his breath carries the soft sweetness of dead things and I am not fooled and cannot trust him, even though Sean loves him as much as he loves me, even though he loves Sean back.

But I do not want to walk the tideline, hoping and yet not hoping, wondering if the Scorpio sea will give back what it has taken and if so, how much.

So I stand in the dark, blood-stained stable with its smell of seawater and death and I press my cold, bloodless cheek to his and whisper, over and over into the red, pain-turned ear.

“ _Please, do not eat Sean Kendrick”_

 

**_*     *     *_ **

 

The sky is grey with dawn by the time I return to Sean and bed and sleep, and blue-grey when I have to get up again, exhausted and snappish with the sleepless night.

It is a cruelty that we can't leave straight away and get the whole affair done with but there are more horses than Corr on the island and they have to be fed and watered and mucked out. By the time I have wheeled the last barrow of manure to the heap and emptied it, it is almost noon and lack of sleep, damp shoes and sandy clothes have combined to create such a miasma of petty discomfort that I have almost forgotten the greater misery amongst the many smaller ones.

 

We have agreed that I will get Dove and meet Sean down on the beach. Sometimes a land mare is a mate to a water horse and sometimes it is food, but either might persuade Corr to return and even if the sea works a miracle he will never be able to catch her.

I also bring a backpack with towels, dry clothes and a thermos of hot cocoa - the temperature of the sea in February is no joke. This is my own initiative, for although Sean knows exactly how he will get Corr into the water, not once has he uttered the words _'when we come out of the sea...'_

 

Even though it is twice as far to the beach from my house as it is from the Yard, Dove and me still arrive before Sean does. I slacken the reins so she can stretch her neck out and let her choose her own pace and way down to the waterline. I try not to think of how completely my life might change within an hour. It's not that I would never get over it. I loved my parents very much and yet they are dead and I am often happy, though for the first few weeks afterwards I thought I never could be.

No, I will bury Sean, if I have to and I'll survive it. But nothing will ever be quite as good again.

 

If Sean is right though and it works, then Corr could stand at stud, the father of gentle, salt-smelling horses who love the sea and can almost outrun the wind. Maybe Sean will even be able to ride him eventually, not in the races perhaps, but riding all the same, down on the loose, soft sand at the sea's edge. With the money from Corr's foals and my wages we will build a stable, stone walled and twice the size of a loose box with iron handles that only turn counter-clockwise, so that Corr can stay on our own land and be safe there, scenting the distant sea.

 

Dove twists beneath me, looking back over her shoulder with a soft whicker of welcome and I turn with her and see Corr, hunching along on three legs, down the same track he has raced ever since Sean was a boy. Every step is a pain to him and even when Sean stops to let him rest his face never loses its intense, inward look. He is hurting all the time.

I remember riding the piebald, how her muscles had stretched and changed beneath me when the sea struck her and Sean, who has seen them swimming, says the change goes all the way down to the bones.

It might work. It has to.

 

At the sea's edge there is no pause, no ceremony of undressing. The water is too cold to brave bare skinned and Corr will bear Sean up or drag him down as he chooses; the weight of his clothes will make little difference.

The drag of the surf around his hooves seems to wake Corr up. His skin shudders where the salt spray hits it and he raises his tail like a red banner, looking at Dove out of his left eye. His lip curls upward, catching the scent of her. Then, as the sea pulls at him again, he turns to face the horizon and though each step is an effort, it is one he willingly makes.

Sean is whispering to him all the time and Corr keeps one ear turned to his voice. He tells them what they need to hear. I wonder what Corr needs to hear, with the ocean foaming about his shoulders and lapping over his back. I wonder if he remembers what I told him last night, if he can hear it over the insistent pulse of sea magic that sings to the salt of his blood and spit.

_Please, do not eat Sean Kendrick_

I nudge Dove forward till the white foam comes hissing about her knees.

Far out, on the very edge of hearing, I think I can make out a faint sound; a low, descending moan, like a woman sobbing underwater.

I think of the piebald I have returned to the sea. I think of her treacherous, slippery sides and her reaching yellow teeth. I think of Sean, turning towards a dip in the water, the only warning of a large body, moving very fast.

I will never forgive myself.

I strain, but hear nothing more over the hushing of the surf.

 _Shhhhhh shhhhhh_ it says, and sucks at the toes of my shoes.

They are much further out than Sean meant for them to go, but Corr isn't trying to dive, and when Sean tugs at his bridle to urge him to swim lengthwise to the shore, he turns from the flat blue line of horizon that must be calling him so insistently.

Somewhere, under or around them, the piebald mare is swimming. Somewhere, under or around them are the grey remains of Tommy Falk, the crimson strips of Mutt's shirt and anything that is left of my parents.

A wave rises, crests and when it subsides the two small dots they have become seem a little closer to the shore.

When Sean leads Corr out of the sea he will move a little easier than before, the swelling in his joints subsiding in the weightless cool of the water, the muscles in his damaged leg remembering how to stretch and flex, reshaping themselves to meet the different needs of sea and land. The journey back to the stables will be quicker, Corr will hold his head higher and afterwards we can go home and drink cups of hot, real tea and eat the day old cinnamon twists which Finn brings back with him.

The sea swells again and Dove shifts beneath me as the waves dig away at the sand beneath her hooves, dragging her forward. In the moment it takes to calm and steady her, I lose sight of them.

It doesn't mean they have gone under. The sun has come out from behind the clouds; the sea flings the light back into my eyes like a silver mirror and it would be so easy to miss them, a boy's head and a horse's, amongst the blinding glitter.

I let the reins drop from my hands, no better than a novice. A long, blood red hair is caught in the wool of my sweater. I pull it out and twist it between my fingers, so that it stretches, then snaps.

_Please, do not eat Sean Kendrick_

Dove steps further into the surf, staring at something, tense and interested. Her ears prick forward with a glad whinny of recognition. I strain my eyes, but I can't see what it is that she sees.

 _Shhhhhh Shhhhhh,_ says the sea.

 

It has taken a lot of things from me. Sometimes, it gives them back.

 


End file.
